extreme legibility

Owls Do Cry by Janet Frame (George Brazilier, 1996; originally published by Brazilier in 1960)

 

Pegasus Press, New Zealand, 1957; cover illustration by Dennis Beytagh

It's been a long time since I've read a book as brilliant and creative and disturbing as Owls Do Cry.  I have known about Janet Frame for a very long time, but never had a good sense of her work and never read anything by her until now.  I wonder why that is?  It seems odd that no one has recommended this extraordinary writer to me and urged me to read her work.

Owls Do Cry is Frame's first novel (her first book, a collection of short stories, was awarded a prize days before she was scheduled to undergo a lobotomy, which was cancelled because of the news).  It is the story of the gradual but inexorable deterioration of the Withers family.  They live (in New Zealand) in dirt and poverty and there seems to be no way for any of them to advance in the world.  One one daughter manages to escape destruction by marrying a successful man and heartlessly distancing herself, emotionally and geographically, from  her siblings and parents.  

The novel follows the children from early childhood to middle age.  Their lives are terrible and they seem helpless to change anything.  There is only violence and madness and family, all held together with a  heartbreaking ineffectual love.

Frame is a brilliant and exciting stylist:  her prose is inventive and unbound by convention; even the placement of the words on the page is often surprising and poetic.  She writes with the freedom and passion of Joyce but with less ego and ambition, and her prose subsequently outreaches itself, so that one reads with, rather than against, the current.

A thrillingly and uniquely good book.

Guard Your Daughters by Diana Tutton (Persophone, 2017; originally published by Chatto & Windus in 1953)

 

Guard Your Daughters is an interesting and engaging book.  In many ways, it's familiar: an eccentric British family, the Harveys, have too many daughter -- 5 in this case: Pandora, Thisbe, Morgan, Cressida, and Teresa (the mother lost interest in naming after the fourth daughter so poor Teresa was named by her less romantic father).  The Harveys life in self-elected poverty in a huge house outside of a small village.  Mr. Harvey is a very successful writer of mysteries, and his wife is a beautiful but extremely fragile woman who must be constantly catered to, cosseted, and comforted, for she has a great fear of losing any of her daughters to husbands or even to friends. There is something monstrous in the way she allows her infirmity to control the family, and something mysterious about the way they allow her to thwart their lives.  Any show of independence or interest or engagement with the outside world on the part of the daughters results in Mother taking to her bed with debilitating and dramatic hysterics.  So the girls are haphazardly and eccentrically educated at home and made to cook and clean and basically devote their lives to maintaining the domestic status quo.  

But when the oldest daughter, Pandora, meets a nice young man while teaching Sunday School and manages to quickly get herself married to him and removed to London, the mother's iron grip is weakened, and the remaining daughters begin to rebel, and seek out men for their own.  The novel centers around their collective pursuit of two candidates and the disastrous effect this has on the family's and the mother's stability.

The novel is narrated by the middle sister, Morgan, and she does a good job revealing her family and their queer world to the reader, which often reminds us of two other famous British literary families: the Bennetts and the Mitfords. But beneath the idiosyncratic comic veneer lurks disturbing and dark shadows concerning Mrs Harvey's health -- unlike the Bennett or Mitford parents, her eccentricity is not benign, and the book shades darker as it concludes.

Tutton is a deft and vivid writer, and knows how to keep her work breezy but also textured and somewhat complex.  Her other two novels deal with incest and a woman's affair with her son-in-law, and I'd be interested in reading both of them, as I feel that she tackles difficult  issues with a funny, rosy (yet thorny) touch.

 

 

The Nature of Passion by R. (Ruth) Prawer Jhabvala (Norton, 1957)

 

The Nature of Passion, Jhabvala's second novel, is a thoroughly charming and very adroitly observed and written.  I bought it because I had read somewhere that it was reminiscent of Jane Austen, and it is, although it takes place in a very different place (India) and time (mid-twentieth-century).  

Lalaji runs a successful construction business in Delhi, and lives somewhat luxuriously with his (unnamed) wife, his tyrannical and tradition-bound widowed sister, his six children -- 3 males and 3 females -- and assorted servants.  His children are all pretty much settled, happily or unhappily married, except for his youngest son and daughter, who both want something different than their older siblings.  Nimi, Lalji's beautiful and vivacious daughter, wants to get a college education and marry for love; Vidi, his son, wants to travel to Europe and then pursue a career in the arts.  All of these desires run contrary to the family's and their culture's strong tradition, which require arranged marriages and for sons to follow their fathers into business.

The book has a large cast of very well-observed and entertaining characters and Jhabvala  has an energetic and merry narrative sense.  Her writing is first-rate -- clear and sensual.  A lovely and delightful book.